Homeward Bound (3000) by Biff Cappuccino


It was one of those moments in which I was asking myself, "Why am I still here?" I wasn't wondering why was I still on the island, but why was I still here sitting at this table with Jeff Desjardin and his band of fair-weather amigos chundering away at the table leaving me to myself, my wife and boredom makes three. I decided then and there that my misplaced loyalty to him would not be misplaced again. But then I remembered having made this oath, or something like it, before.

We were celebrating Jeff's wedding of convenience with a stag party: one with women in attendance, but minus the principle inconvenience of the bride. He blamed it all on being ‘seduced against my will’ by a widower ten years his senior with a permanently gammy leg, two teenage kids, and a not inconsiderable bank account. Jeff had a jolly look while he slapped me hard on the back, a virile warning that ‘loose lips sink ships’ and explained conspiratorially: "There's something about her that brings out the compassion in me, you knows? I have this, je ne sais quois, this sympathy fer someone down on her luck that way. I've had me a long run of good luck in me day, it's like time to give back to society and all."

I paused, impressed. Not with the fibbing, but with his appropriation of 'give back to society.' Could he parse it? I had trouble enough pinning the phrase down myself, like stabbing a wriggling leech to a specimen board. But he had graced me with an explanation. That meant he took me seriously, which placed me somewhere on the right road to respect. It warmed my heart that the sun was deigning to shine upon its satellite.

I was with my wife, Chang. Her Chinese name was Ho Chia-rong. She’d been obstinate about adopting a proper English name. Celia, Victoria, Vanity, Madonna, Britney. I could tolerate anything better than Chang! “No can do!” she’d stammered, pouting and railing puny fists. She was too polite to say that my friends were too complacent or incompetent to pronounce her Chinese name without desecrating it. She’d sized them up. Chang was as familiar as Chink and just as easy to roll off leather tongues.

We’d been invited to fill out today’s motley crew and demonstrate to all and sundry, perhaps mostly to Jeff himself, that not all of Jeff’s friends were from the south island wasteland of fly-by-night English teachers and its ultra-demimonde of retired crooks and part-time gang-bangers. The wife and I were the token high-society folks, the sort he aggressively mocked behind my back to put his envy at ease. We were there to witness the festivities and give our benediction via sainted smiles. The quasi-religious significance came inadvertently from my movement into the literary world where I was, if truth be told, a failed and failing writer. But in a non-reading world such as Jeff’s I enjoyed a cachet the illiterate typically grant to those wielding the written word. I was become a shaman through my holy ivory-tower abracadabra and was respected for the occasional shots of mystic mumbo-jumbo I sent across the bow.

I’d become privy to the attempted heist of the widower’s heritage while witnessing him in the courtroom. The wife-to-be was sweating nervously in shorts and crutches; he was proudly decked out in slip-in buckle loafers, gray designer exercise pants, a dark leather sorority jacket, and a ratty scarf that encircled his neck like the skeleton of a python that made a mistake. The judge was the Southeast Asian doppelganger of James Earl Jones and repeatedly pursed rubbery Negrito lips, giving Jeff a forceful fishy eye, indicating either prior acquaintance or that he expected to be seeing Jeff again in the far from distant future. Nevertheless, the proceedings went off smoothly, as mechanically as assembling a printed circuit board.

For now, happy days were here. We were living large, pals united by a crimeless crime, un-bustable proto-thieves, honorable men before the law, stuffing our gizzards on his wife's tab. We were at Jose's Mexican restaurant, a dive which attracts customers primarily by osmosis; strays and hungry waifs are lured in by its auspicious location next to the Tony Aroma's Prime Rib. Jeff and friends were boisterous, munching loudly, sucking back beers, and kicking up a friendly racket. Through the yellow-bean oil, the beer, and the cigarettes, I could smell whiffs of wino and rotting onions. Somebody or some bodies in attendance were hitting the local cough medicine overstrongly again.

It wasn’t Jeff though, for he shoved me amiably and said, "Be a sport and grab me some Whisby outer the shop there, will ya?" He was pointing out the window and, despite the vaguely familiar name, ‘Whisby’ isn’t the Chinese bastardization of ‘whisky’, but instead a total misnomer stimulant packed with caffeine, sugar and nicotine.

"I look underage and I'm not carrying any ID,” I apologized.

Fred, his buff blonde partner in excess, three armed robbery counts in the home country but now reinvented as respectable English Teacher and contributor to a better tomorrow, pointed a grubby finger and exclaimed, "He thinks he needs ID. In this country?" and he burst out laughing, food heaving between flapping lips.

I tried not to look while Jeff cuffed him up the side of his head. "He's my friend, asshole! I won't stand for none of that shit!” And to the rest of the table, “There’ll be no razzing him and that." He picked up his bottle of beer and drank, the table quiet as it waited for him to put it down and start talking again.

Fred had quailed. No choice because Jeff was his source for weed. Fred couldn't function on a daily basis without his stone for hoops, his teaching stone, sex stone, snooze stone, stoned stone. He'd have gone into the agricultural biz himself, as Jeff had done successfully, but his bluster masked a timidity unwilling to risk having his neck stretched under a scaffold, the sentence that went with trafficking on this island.

My wife tugged on my arm looking for attention, her excuse being to nag me in Chinese with: "Stop chattering. You and your pals are just like a bunch of women. Eat your food before it gets cold!"

Fred said, "I like your wife. She's cute!" and he smiled like he’d enjoy slapping her. Probably on the ass. She ignored him.

Jeff rabbit punched me in the shoulder. I pretended to be a man, while he said, "And don't take no offense at Fred. He don't speak for me. But he’s fucking A-okay! Okey-dokey?” I deadpanned to mess with him, whereupon he growled under his breath, “Ya overeducated bastard. You always gots an expression like yer dick got squeezed between the covers of a book.” But then he seemed to suddenly realize he was blowing his cover. He got his act together quickly, grinned a sharp toothed smile and said, “Now looky here." He figured I owed him and to seal the deal he put his arm around like we were instant pals again. "I really need a suck of that shit, eh? Liquid wrench, you see?” Convivially, sincerely this time, hoping I’d go for it, he said, “Look, I’ll share it with ya. These a-holes don’t like it, but I’m telling ya, it’s great shit. I’m fucking serious. Puts a frikken jump into your freaking step. So how's about you get off your knobby arse and fetch a bottle for me?"

"No can do.” I said in a chipper tone, “My wife wants me to eat."

He whispered so my wife wouldn't hear: "Don't tell me you've gone all fucking pussy on me, ya fucking pussy you?"

I looked at the food and twisted my lips into a tragic grimace of defeat. Fred was a slave to weed, Jeff was a slave to his women. Only when the cat was away, could the rat come out and play. He couldn’t imagine that I ran my marriage like a house of correction. I don’t know why more men don’t. But it was enough to put him off his stride. He gave up in disgust.

The plates came and I discovered we were being treated to the house enchiladas. They were deep-fried like chicken nuggets or old-fashioned doughnuts. The salsa sauce wasn't hot, but sweet: a sort of Mexican equivalent to Chinese-American food where ketchup does double duty as fermented bean sauce and beet sugar has superceded MSG.

It put me in the mood to find a 7-11 and buy a hotdog. Reliably, dependably mediocre fast food, but at least not disappointing. My wife was staring at me, willing me to eat, nodding at the food like I was a pet unhappy with kibble and holding out for table scraps. I returned to staring at my plate, looking at this desecration of LA Tex-Mex, while Jeff and his buddies were greedily shoveling the profanity into their mouths, spilling flakes of deep-fried crust on their shirts.

Jeff was talking out loud to his plate, "I want to get one of those paintball kits. Man, when that ball hits, it stings!" Looking up at the table he wagged his chin, inciting a table-wide Pavlovian chain-reaction of chin wagging, and said "Ain't nothing better than a good old game of paintball to get you going, put the zip back into you?"

Fred one-upped him, "You got to think larger than that Jeff. Get yourself a new Lexus. Insure it. Then, when it gets stolen, get a new one for free."

Jeff was nodding, “Hmm… not bad...” filing the suggestion away for future use. "That could work. That could be the ticket!"

Ralph upped the ante with, "No way man. I say, you should go all the way and get a sea plane. This is an island, don’t forget. You can land anywhere." Anywhere, except where we and most of the national population was: several miles inland. "Travel in style. Check it out, Jeff." A murmur of approval made its way around the table, with me mumbling too so as not to be a wet blanket. Chang pinched my forearm. Jeff rode the wave of support, exclaiming, "Yeah, that's the ticket. Fuck China Airlines. Too expensive. Shitty service. My own plane. All I gotta worry about then is the gas money."

He was beaming, ecstatic at his deft integration of luxury with economy. Talk was a luxury that was indeed economic. Talking was an opportunity to create fantasies. They spent many an evening building the improbable into the incredible and finally the impossible, looking back on their accomplishment and giving it due appreciation, like it was a real-world work of art, substantial and lasting.

Their mirth, their hopes, ambitions, and expectations depressed me. But why should I care anyway? I relaxed, exhaled, and smiled blankly to Jeff who wasn’t paying attention. To each their own, I thought. They were happy. ‘Butt out!’ was the best advice I could give myself.

I turned to my wife, who was slurping beer from my glass rather than order a beer of her own. I said in Chinese, "What was I thinking? Why did I come here?" But she just shrugged and pushed her plate away, dodging involvement and said, "It was your idea. We should've gone to the Burmese ghetto." I dabbed at the food detritus that always built up on her lower, fleshier lip and wiped down my glass where that same lip left sediment behind. She was right though. It was my idea. It was always my idea. That was part of the problem. She didn’t volunteer ideas because I was the male half of the equation. Forming ideas and making personal decisions that overtly involved the both of us was a form of selfishness she didn’t indulge in. Being sly was less obtrusive, less self-centered, less narcissistic. Sneaking my beer, or filching shopping cash from my billfold, wasn’t selfish as long as I didn’t notice.

I looked out the window and into the setting sun, imagining myself eating curried mango, fried curried tuna steaks, tomato and pepper Thai style shrimp on a bed of Indian rice. Ghetto staff barely spoke Chinese, didn't speak a word of English. Being locked out of a Third-world language could be a blessing in itself when you wanted peace of mind. The chef would snort and grunt. The kitchen was far from antiseptic. But the food was three-dimensional, with a foreground of piquancy and a rich background of varied flavors. Each dish was like a culinary success.

But we couldn’t do it. For Jeff it would have been a failure. It was downscale. His new marriage was an upscale success. He and his down-and-out pals, as always, wanted dreamscape, the appearance of good food, good living, good friends; not the reality. Status was more important, for status was the trumping of appearances over reality. And this was despite Jeff having taste in food; becoming a philistine of the palate had been a journey, a personal jihad I’d critiqued for taking him into glorious nether world of nothingness and nobodies. And yet he’d landed on all four feet like a cat. Of all things, the rat had cornered his prey, the new wife.

I’d taken to daydreaming again and was looking out the window. Someone dapper was standing there. He’d emerged from Tony Aroma’s and was now scorching a cigarette with a metal lighter, a gleam of reflecting sunlight coming in the window now and again. He began rocking back and forth for warmth in the chill breeze.

I pushed away my plate of deep-fried failure. Jeff noticed I was bored. Shoving me to get my blood flowing, he narrowed his eyes when I turned to look at him, daring me to cross him. "Well what do you got’s to say there Biff?"

But I wasn’t’ in the mood for jousting and launched a camouflage of verbiage into the air. "I think you should do something more profitable with your time, bud. You've got a talent for HRM. You’re connected with the local panjandrums. You speak the biz lingua franca plus dialect. Build on your skill-set and take her out for a test drive."

He smiled slowly, carefully, wondering whether there was a joke or a trap somewhere in that tangle of nonsense. He bunched his lips like a horse plucking a sugar cube, marking time to think. Eventually he pronounced, "Yeah, fer sure. Too right. Just thinking about that one the other day, there." I didn’t follow this up. Neither did the rest of the table, which had gone silent, people dodging my eyes.

My wife pinched me, sensing I’d said something rude. The problem was more like I had failed to say something rude. Fred's mouth was half open and he was squinting at me, waiting for me to say something intelligible, so he could close his trap and get on with chewing. Ralph was more of a decision-maker, pissed and yearning to nail me for showing off with fancy five-dollar words.

Suddenly Jeff looked at the table and fished out a Doritos chip and held it up to the light. Scanning it like a prospector holding a diamond in the rough up against the sun, he said, "Look man, don't that have the figure of Doreen? Can you see it, Biff? Like a brick-shithouse, yeah! Check it out.” I was appalled but for official confirmation he pushed it under my nose. As I brought my head back to look at it, he pushed it under my nose again. I didn't know if I should look at it or eat it.

He got impatient and made a face like I was an oaf or an ignoramus.

Ralph’s girlfriend spoke in English, seeing an opportunity for language practice, and hooked a finger in the air at me, “He stupid. He got shit for brains.” Ralph made a slow high-five gesture, signaling her to meet his hand over their plates. Their palms slid frictionlessly off each other, making the sound of one hand clapping. “That’s it honey,” he said sweetly, Jesus to a child, his mood made pleasant by her parroting of his favorite phrase. But she was sucking up to him, sucking him ever closer to the alter of marriage.

I was about to explode. Hazing, ground feeders, and wall to wall predators were more than I could take in small doses at this festival of the illiterate. Words failed me so I just signaled that I wanted to go out for a smoke. I excused myself and went out to join the fellow with the metal lighter. He had to be better than this.

It was Franklin. Of all people! A sight for sore eyes. It had been years. He greeted me as a stranger, not recognizing me in my beard. I was too embarrassed to tell him who I was. He was a professor at a good school, I was a kick-around shaman to the illiterati. We said our hellos. Still not knowing who I was, he asked how long I’d been here. I shrugged my bashful way out of answering. He laid down the rules of engagement with, “This island attracts all the riff-raff from across East Asia. If you’re still here in six months, you’ll know you’re one of them.” I laughed, then roared with an elemental, primal joy. I grabbed his hand and shook it violently, in part in celebration, in part for support as I was laughing so hard my legs were beginning to fail me. He was still staring as the tears were streaking down my cheeks and I sank to my knees like I was praying to heaven. In communion with a higher God. I felt home, finally. Home at last.

Chinese Take-away (incomplete practice short story)

Argyll has been an enduring lesson to me in the good sense of a man following his instincts and remaining true to himself. It’s also pointed out to yours truly, with crystal clarity and no little personal embarrassment, the futility of setting oneself up as an amateur wiseacre. For Argyll had no outstanding talents, no silver spoon, no distinguishing training or skill set. And yet, without foresight or planning, he unerringly made a bee line for what he wanted out of life and got it.

His full name was Argyll Alexander and he was a happy love child whose Russian parents conceived him to the free market rhythms of the Bee Gees. 'Staying Alive' was the family anthem. His parents were terrorized Jews who'd got out during the Brezhnev era of the Cold War. They arrived in Israel, joyous and ready to kibbutz but then discovered the disadvantages of not being Ashkenazi or Yemeni. They joined the second stage of the diaspora out of Russia, which was a Pan Am flight to New York City. There they discovered street crime and the disadvantages of not being WASP. Their surname, Alexandrov, became Alexander in short order while his father kept a lookout for jobs that allow them to move out of the Bronx. Daddy Alexander was brilliant, industrious, and published, and soon established himself as an associate professor of Russian studies at Columbia. When the opportunity to become full professor at UC Berkeley came up, he didn't hesitate to make the leap across the flyover country.

Argyle grew up in an elegant loft on Telegraph Avenue, right above Blondie's Pizza (then only $.50 for a wedge of pepperoni pie) and right across the street from Chinky's Take Out (since renamed Chinese Oriental Dreams). The family was impecunious in those early days and ate economically. Fast food was not a luxury but a mainstay and little Argyle made frequent trips to local eateries for instant eating. As a young boy Argyll appreciated Blondie's cool counter culture: the groovy staff picking their noses and daring you to buy a slice, and the service with a sneer and in-house motto of 'the customer is always wrong'. But it was Chinese Oriental Dreams that really captured his fancy. Nose-plunging and loogee hacking was au naturel. The chef was earthy and unpretentious, wearing his culinary heart all over his sleeves. The staff was solicitous to the point of being sycophantic. And you didn't have to tip if you didn't want to. And Argyle's family didn't want to.

The staff spoke this mysterious Oriental language that sounded like jackdaws crowing or crows jackdawing. And little Argyle just loved Chinese food. Bite-sized pot stickers, steamed buns that fit into your hand, baked duck tidbits, won-tons that melted in your mouth. As a small person, even big food could be threatening to Argyle. Thanksgiving turkeys were vast and imposing, gnawing on drumsticks was awkward and dirty. Baked potatoes were heavy and looked like weapons to be lobbed, while there was something deceitful about the secret heat contained within their skins. He stayed away from them after he realized they were organic bombs, sizzling traps for surprised mouths. But Chinese food was small and delicate, just like him. Dainty morsels for tender hearts. It was no accident that he was forever enamored of things Chinese from childhood on.

In Berkeley, however, to his parents chagrin he picked up the Berkeley vibe. They became tense with worry and increasingly irritable. Would this doom his professional future? Their baby-boy!

Whereas his parents' first-hand experience with a socialist state had made them rabidly anti-Communist, Argyle recognized that their trauma had produced pathology: an unfortunate blinkered cynicism. They were in America now, America the beautiful! Each day was the first day in the rest of your life and they just didn't get it. He personally felt the vibe, breathed it in and mellowed on it. He was encouraged and humbled, doing his own part working for a better today and tomorrow for everyone. He joined the informal Telegraph Rainbow Coalition in his own unique uniform of tie-die and Birkenstocks. Donning lenseless eyewear was a sign of protest, a declaration of community and sympathy with the faux African-American student nerds on campus. No purple lenses, no purple haze, man. Too sixties. Outside of class, he was proactively evolving into a part-time soft-soap Socialist, full of warm and fuzzy feelings, a penchant for ruminative navel gazing, and a clean all-American desire to help the underdog. And when the underdog wasn't himself, it could include others.

I first met him in a hostel when he took the bunk bed above mine. I’d been hoping to keep the top bunk free for laying out clothes to dry and for shagging chicks. Height in a hostel bed means privacy from eager eyes on lower bunks. I’d piled all sorts of junk up there: slippers, sneakers, and a filthy ash tray. I'd dumped all of this mess on top of an old blanket. It was stained with menstrual blood, urine, and spent sperm symbolizing various trophy bangs of the previous occupant. He'd unwittingly revived the 19th-century tradition whereby surgeons refused to clean their bloody aprons on the premise that the more blood and gore the more experienced the surgeon. A good advertising meme never dies. Either way, rather than degrade and waste the blanket by cleaning it up, I put it to worthy use as a sort of filthy scarecrow to keep away fastidious occupants. But Argyle wasn’t impressed. He wasn't fastidious. He was down with dirt, into coexisting with germs, rather like me. But he was also on his own trip. Up there on the top bunk, at the end of a hard morning and ready for a mid-day siesta, he just wanted shade from the bright lights, bright city.

I got back from work one day and found him up there sound asleep. Bummed, I shook him and asked him about his luggage, hoping to ferret out some excuse to weasel him out of staying in the top bunk. He gained consciousness slowly and grinned even slower still and said with a doper’s smile, “I don’t have any, man. I mean, like, a shirt and pants is all I need to motor. If I need more I’ll buy some.” Coming up with negative, I changed the topic to girls, he said, “I love Vietnamese chicks, dude. Oh, they’re…” He thought for a moment, pondering the possibilities, and said, “They’re… cool.” 'Cool' was the perfect word. It was also the only word. When I asked him why he'd come to China and not gone to Vietnam, and hoping I could put him back on his plane, he replied, “No way dude." He shook his head languidly, smiling that die-hard smile, "It's too far.” And when he bumped into me and a couple of friends out on the disco circuit he shouted admiringly, “You guys are hot!”

You get the picture. He was in a dimension of his own. But he was also the nicest of guys and always operated with the best of intentions. He wouldn't sneak my shaver, leaving me with a rash the next time I scraped the blade packed with someone else’s germ flora over my skin. He wouldn't wipe down the table with one of my shirts and blame it on the Chinese cleaning staff. He wouldn't steal the clips off my backpack or scratch my CDs or cockroach my cigarettes. And he wouldn't answer the hostel phone and tell female callers that I wasn't in but that I had deputized him to service them on my behalf. Nevertheless, we were on a different wavelength and on a different wavy-gravy trip.

He moved out soon and we went our separate ways. It wouldn't have surprised me if I'd never seen him again. But then we both inadvertently landed jobs in the same translation office. We translated study plans and recommendation letters with our clients beside us and most of our clients were university seniors, getting ready to leave the country and perform studies overseas. The females, no matter how appealing they were on their own merits, were ugly ducklings on the local dating scene. Local fellahs couldn't take them seriously as marriage material. Not if they were going to be spending a year or more abroad amongst Hollywood temptations. This made our office a meat-market and cornucopia of cute petitsas.

Argyle, however, was having a hard time mastering the local ways and professional lays. His penchant for being a man of few words handicapped him in an industry specializing in excessive verbiage. Nervous-nelly Chinese students, some of the most homework bound in the scholastic universe, found his almost pathological inability to be nervous disturbing. They complained about his speed. His permanently happy face made them resentful at first, and finally, sulky. Perhaps worst of all, many of the female clientele wanted a nubile man and felt ripped off having been assigned a dud for a stud, which is to say, a defective translator.

But Argyle just took it in stride and put it down to cultural differences. "You can't criticize The Other or Otherness. It's just, I dunno... Insensitive." One major cultural difference was that the Chinese hadn't discovered this fact and complained majorly about other cultures and other Others. In this case, the Other was Argyll. But he wasn't jugged by the boss. He always won the sympathy vote. Mine too.

Then one day it looked like he was going to score. I was delighted and the rest of the office rooted privately for him too. All eyes were on the fetching minx: an aboriginal babe, dusky and pretty and foreign to the Chinese rat race. Come down from high mountain ledges with pristine air, she was a natural flower child and in sync with his trip. To me, she was a coconut princess, the airhead with a good heart that Argyle was discovering best suited him. By fits and starts, he was coming to grips with the awkward fact that for him Chinese culture was often best divorced from the people who created it.

As the afternoon progressed, they got along swimmingly and she edged closer and closer to him. I'd seen clients go so far as to sit on the laps of their foreign consultants, but this wasn’t her style. Her Chinese name was Serene Grace and when he asked her for her native language name, she was embarrassed, but happily so. No Chinese would have asked. Better get the savages in the habit of speaking a real language. Chop-chop!

He found her shyness inviting and insisted on disinterring her real name, the authentic Otherness. 'Mountain Orchid' she whispered and he gasped. She stared at him moonily, waiting for him to make the next move. He stared back at her, fascinated. Checkmate. Over the course of the dreamy air-conditioned afternoon, they gelled sweetly, like honey and molasses.

He invited her to a movie, paying for her ticket. She took him home, for free. On a mattress laid out on the floor of a Spartan bedroom, he put his cock in her hand and taught her how to pleasure a man. After a few seconds he barked like a puppy and as he shot forth, she burst into a shriek. "What's the matter honey," Argyll pleaded out of breath and still dopey from the rush.

She was shaking, shocked by the unnatural bodily eruption. "What's that?" Pointing with the other hand at the sticky mess of Elmer's glue on her fingers and blouse.

"Well what do you think it is, baby?" he replied calmly. She looked helpless, inarticulate but who needed words with those limpid puppy-dog eyes. He looked deeply, drinking deeply of the wells of her soul, and said sympathetically, "Honey, its sperm."

She grew calmer and then pouted like she was going to cry. In full wail, "I didn't know it came from there!!!" and fell on his shoulders sobbing.

Argyle was moved. These were the protests of a lady. A princess. His coconut princess.

It was such a touching scene that when Argyle told me, I couldn't help burst out laughing. "Where do you find these players, dude?"

"She's not a player!" he protested. "She's my... my honeybunch." And the earnest expression on his face which had recently been covering for the happier smilier one indicated he was falling for her.

In the office one of the other translators, Jess, who'd bounced from the low-rent Oregon grunge scene to the lower-rent China teaching scene, tried to be helpful, “Is she religious by any chance? You know, a lot of these mountain tribes have a hard-on for Jesus."

A flicker of recognition spread across his face. "I think she's... yeah, yeah. Totally. She's a Catholic I think."

Jess was young, buff, and blond. Living in a developing country had gone to his head and he boasted regularly that he was a 'sexual athlete. I score hat tricks real regular.' I was afraid to ask what a hat-trick was and I didn't want to encourage him. Trying to be helpful he said to Argyll, "Well, you know the deal with the Whores of Rome. Hand jobs, blow jobs, and in the keister. The Catholic hat-trick is what you should be aiming for buddy."

Argyll had a dithering look on his face, his mellow approximation of distaste.

But it had no impact on Jess. After all, unsolicited advice is often just a cover for hassling someone. "Everything's kosher with these chickypoos," he said. "Just not regular sex. Some of these Catholic girls even become keister bunnies. I don't flirt with religious skirts myself, but, hey, check it out, you might like it." And he extended a duo of thumbs up, only half in self-parody.

But Argyll was turning up his nose. She was a lady, and he wouldn't debase her by treating her like a normal human being. He later confided to me that he was “delighted she wouldn't go all the way, man. I mean, it’s a privilege to be rejected. Don’t you get it?” I didn’t. Since when was rejection not failure? But he corrected me saying, “Jeez, dude. I mean, going all the way was something she would have done in a one-night stand situation. This is serious. Romance! She’s taking it slow.” A glowing smile spread over his face, like the warm assurance of the morning sun inching above the horizon. His languid emotions could have a powerful charismatic effect, like now. Though I always tried to duck their impact, his emotions, always sincere and felt whole-hog, could really resonate with me.

But the implication remained that marriage was the only solvent capable of prying open her legs. Though, of course, he wanted much more than just sex. A soul mate and intellectual companionship. And this was how we ended up going down to the east coast into a pretty little town above the littoral.

We flopped aboard the drowsiest coziest train down from Taipei, past defunct fishing villages with dry-docked boats in gay colors, their pretty names painted in pictorial Chinese script. And shunted by shut-down rusting mining towns, their collapsing plants and wasted landscapes reminiscent of industrial England. We continued moseying on down past a vast plain invaded and settled by Chinese who'd pushed the aborigines into the surrounding escarpments. Argyll, inner-peace incarnate, slept, while I watched the clock frustrated with being unable to sleep or read.

Finally we reached another spine of dark plush mountains, rushed through several strobe-lit tunnels, eventually coming out to South Harbor station where we disembarked. Refreshed, Argyll sucked in the wet air and beheld the spanking new fragrance of flowers and diesel. He got into the moment, immersing himself and luxuriating in these primal joys in a way that I could only observe from the outside like an ornithologist trying to imagine being a bird in flight. I envied him.

My attention span was different, and so inevitably was my focus. Or lack thereof. We were at the ocean edge of a floodplain emerging between two parallel mountain chains. This was a flat delta of gravel and immense boulders tumbled down by the slashing downpours of a thousand generations of hurricanes. The mountainsides were radiant, festooned with a modern and prehistoric flora: fern trees, man-size fronds of wild rhubarb, tree-strangling creepers, tree-strangling trees, then hardwoods, then cedars and looming pines outlining the mountain ridges which themselves loomed gray and threatening in the sea-deep sky. It was a beautiful Jurassic Park panorama that pushed profoundly into the heart of the island for 20 km or more. The air above was crystal clear, the sky a pelagic blue with intermittent shape-shifting tufts of white and circling raptors riding thermals. If you gazed long enough, the sky became a vast ocean, as if you were looking down upon the Earth from space.

Mountain Orchid met us at the train station and escorted us to her home. We entered a surprisingly expansive living room to find a tasty spread waiting for us: plates bearing salted guava fruit, sliced pears, jellied sun dried prunes, roasted peanuts, and dried shrimp with chili peppers. This was ringed by shot glasses of mountain oolong tea: in this case, above-average leaves which performed their appointed role of puckering astringency and leaving the tongue with a sweet after-taste. I looked around and was impressed with the busy way the room had been stuffed with woodwork, not just the beveled shelves, the varnished furniture, and the professionally stained knickknacks, but also the expensive selection of carved driftwood scattered about the floor without any real plan. This stuff is popular along the Chinese coast as it's considered fortuitous and to occasionally house spirits. Well-shellacked, one gallant old stump did service as our table.

Her father approached us and shook our hands. He making an impression in his oversized and baggy turquoise woolen sweater which puffer-fish fashion, puffed his upper body to nearly twice life-size. This was despite the fact he was already sturdy fellow inhabiting a six-foot frame. He looked to be in his sixties, with a sun-dried sable skin and an air of fatigue and ennui hanging about him. Perhaps we weren’t the first courtiers. He was doing double-duty as chaperone and body guard, standing up for law and order and making sure the foreigners didn't get out of hand, raise riot in the middle of the night, and go hunting for scalps. But his was a not unreasonable suspicion. After all, we were a couple of young bucks from another tribe and in his house sniffing after the women.

I’d heard from a friend who frequented these mountain ranges that these people were fiercely resentful of the neighboring aboriginal peoples. Their numbers were small which made them edgy and suspicious of outsiders. Until the Japanese and Chinese came hacking through the bush a century back and the wild shooting broke out, the aborigines and their culture had been untouched and in a pristine state of going at each other’s throats for centuries like the Hatfields and McCoys of yore. Chopping off heads was their bar mitzvah ritual. You didn't graduate to manhood until you'd assassinated another man. Traditional communication with the spirit ancestors was accomplished by pressing a prisoner into service and shooting arrows into him with a wish-list attached. When he died, his spirit communicated your wish list to the deceased ancestors. I often wondered if head-hunting was an unconscious Neolithic form of population control which enabled the aboriginals to live in harmony with the rest of nature, mankind not included. I didn't bother sharing any of this cultural history and idle speculation with Argyll because he would have felt, perhaps correctly, that I was deliberately acting as a wet blanket to extinguish his idyllic romance. Besides, I could already envision him making a face and lecturing me, ‘Times have changed. Each day is a new day, bud. The first day in the rest of history’s days...

We were introduced by Mountain orchid to her father, mother, and an extremely appealing sister with perfect skin, large eyes, a forthright gaze, and marvelously thick eyebrows that gave her a wolfish hungriness. It took a pronounced effort on my part not to stare. The Chinese feminine reaction to my ill-disguised interest would have been panic and a disappearance act or else overeager solicitousness as the horse got out of the hustings and the chase began. With this mountain woman, however, there was something primal about her, a lack of inhibition proceeding from an absence of strangling social norms that gave her choices beyond those of the more typical Chinese worry-wart. She was comfortable with herself and alert, soaking up context like a sponge.

As a way of introducing ourselves, we chatted about a range of topics. They expounded at length on the circumstances of the local people. The father was particularly favored to know as he had formerly been the village representative. "Outsiders don’t know that we aborigines have traditionally had a very tough time. Invaded by the Chinese, and then the Japanese, and then the Chinese again. Three different regimes, all hostile. Three trials by ordeal. Much bitterness. Terrible memories. These outsiders really hurt our people."

Argyle hunched forward and asked sympathetically, "Are things getting any better these days?"

"Maybe. Economically, things are slowly improving. Still, we are behind the Chinese. We are discriminated against. What can we do about our dark skins? They’re not like a beard you can shave off." And his family tittered. Irritated that his carefully cultivated somber mood had been exploded, he exclaimed, "Are we not all brothers on the inside?" and threw up his hands. He got up and looked out the window with a sad eyes and an affecting gravitas.

While digesting all of this, I'd been gazing around the room absentmindedly, again admiring the wealth of products: the ceramic flatware on display, the Korean brand tea boiler proudly mounted on the stained wood shelf, the 24 inch television advertising that they’d made good. It wasn't a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping spree, but neither was it poverty chic. The aborigines weren't well off? He must have meant some general economic malaise. They must have poor relatives squatting in the hills on their haunches, chewing betel nut, getting mashed on moonshine, and hunting flying possum by night for stew. All that I could see was that his immediate family was doing just fine. The daughter was readying herself for studies abroad, quite an expensive proposition to carry out. And on the train, Mountain Orchid let on that one of her brothers was a local policeman while the other worked for the fire department. Dad was formerly the local government representative. Putting two and two together implied that dad had schemed to put the whole family on the public payroll.

Argyll stood up saying, "Well, I guess your people will just have to take things one step at a time. “Each day presents new opportunities for them. Where there's a will there's a way, that's what we say in America." He looked around the room and said, "At least your people have their culture. Your most valuable heritage."

I wanted to interject and say that gripping their culture to their chests was holding them back. Just as the Amish held themselves back. The difference being that the Amish accepted that walking into the future while looking over their shoulders at the past was a choreography with a downside, as well as an upside.

Mountain Orchid corrected Argyll plaintively, "But our culture is dying. Our people are losing our traditions. Television has invaded our community."

With two people talking this jive, I began to smell a rat: the politics of personal irresponsibility. Losing our traditions? Televisions invading? How can you lose traditions unless you want to give them the slip? And how do TV’s invade and who’s giving them their marching orders?

The handsome sister continued in this fine tradition saying firmly, "Our people only dance for money now. Only for tourists. They won't dance for their own people anymore."

Mountain Orchid summed up, "We’ve lost hope. Our community is falling apart as Chinese capitalism draws our young people away. Even our language is going extinct."

Argyll looked at me and said, " My God! I never even thought of that.” He turned to me and pointed, “Something like six thousand languages are poised for extinction by the end of the 21st century. Isn't that right Bill?"

Bill was me. "Um, I guess so." I said squinting, "That's what some people say anyway."

Argyll was on a roller-coaster ride of purple sympathy and golden righteousness and angry to have his trip interrupted, "Why? Do you have some reason to doubt it?"

Given the mood of the room, debate would have devolved into a rancorous argument so I surrendered the point with a cowardly shrug. I tried to inject myself back into the discussion via saying something useful. "Well, I guess one of the reasons that many minor languages - not that I mean any disrespect to your people’s language - are going under is because they don't have a written form. If some sort of writing script is developed, there's a decent probability that it will last longer I would think."

He stared at me. I stared back. His face was as solid and immobile as a potato. So I said, "Well, perhaps you should think about using the alphabet to transcribe your language. I don't know?" Turning to Argyll, I asked, "What do you think?"

Argyle and Mountain Orchid exclaimed, "Great idea!"

While they celebrated I shook my head and wondered, 'Great idea? Wasn't it the obvious thing to do?" It was the first of those funny moments I've since had many times realizing that outside oppression ain't necessary to keep a people behind; an absence of internal motivation does the job all by itself. And my feeling that this was the case only grew over the next half an hour while we sat around discussing how to canvass for political and financial support to have linguistic experts transcribe their language into print. Help had to be imported in the form of Chinese funding, Chinese experts, Chinese cultural development projects, and Chinese tourists. The climax of these innocently cynical machinations was in the mail already: within a couple of decades they'd become fully acculturated True Patriots of the Middle Kingdom. And the next generation of indignant activists and soul-searching academics would blame the Chinese for it.

A couple of hours later, I was pleasantly stuffed on finger foods, dazed and ready to pack it in. Mountain Orchid spoke to her father in their native tongue, a train of rolling r’s and fluttering f’s ventilated into the evening air. On receiving her orders, she took us to our sleeping quarters across the street. She opened the door to their guesthouse and led us upstairs to a loft containing a pair of pleasant bedrooms. After giving us a quick run through the amenities, she bid us a good night. On showering up and crawling in between the thick cozy covers needed for these mountain locales, I scrounged around for reading material to help put me to sleep. Scanning the shelf of magazines next to my bed I noticed a sci-fi novel and a handful of booklets in Chinese. The novel turned out to be penned by the famous Hong Kong writer, Ni Kuang. I had hopes but after a few pages I concluded he must have written it on the fly to pay gambling debts, for the story wasn’t even good enough for wrapping fish. I turned for relief to the booklets, pried one out and read the words on the cover out loud: Phonetic Transcription of the Shanxi Minority Language. What? I shook my head in disbelief. What a fool I’d been. It was their local language transcribed with the Roman alphabet. It was surprising enough that we spoke Chinese and it must not have crossed their minds that we could read Chinese too. Both parties were full of surprises and I wondered what other surprises were in store for our side of the equation.

I declined putting off showing these booklets to Argyll until morning. My mind would run through scenario after scenario and adversely affect my sleep. I rapped on Argyll's door and shoved a booklet under his nose. He was annoyed. Under the gun, he grew articulate and new expressions I'd never seen before emerged through his skin, "You're so cynical dude. I mean, that might not be their language. How do you know? You know, maybe it was brought in from somewhere else. Like a paradigm for the transcription of their own language or something.” I raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. He began speaking fast, at a normal human pace, saying: “Or maybe another guest left those books here. They could be gifts. These people are very generous. I'm sure they have people here all the time. And didn't you hear what they said? Her dad's a local panjandrum. A big-wig. There's so many possibilities. You don't know what happened. You don’t man. So you shouldn't rush to judgment. You’re so judgmental."

I smirked, "You ought to go to law school when you get back." I blew out my cheeks, seeing this was going nowhere fast. “Well, we could just go and ask them. That would settle things, wouldn't it?" He didn't look amused. "Come on Argyll, let's cross a street and see what's up with this."

Argyle slipped in front of me surprisingly fast, blocking my way. "Hey dude, I can't let you do that. No can do. She invited us down here and there is just no way I'm going to put her in some kind of uncomfortable situation just because you're in a mischievous mood. Look, I invited you down here which makes you my guest. If you go and act like an asshole, I'm the one who's going to get tagged with being a shithead." He switched to a more soothing tone, bringing his pumpkin face closer and breathing on me, "Now I'd appreciate it if you just try it be nice for once. These are nice people. Stop abusing their hospitality."

The only thing that moved me was his sincere desire to enjoy himself here. He made me feel guilty and besides, what was the harm. He had no money, no assets. What could they screw him out of? The worst they were doing was fattening him up and pampering him. So I relented, "What ever turns your crank Argyle. Just sleep on this, man. There's a pattern of..." I wanted to say 'bullshit' but that would have taunted him and lured us both into another pointless discussion. "...a pattern of something going on here." I looked at him, but he was calm, back to being serenity itself. I lost my enthusiasm for pushing him in the direction of unpleasant thoughts and inauspicious suspicions. I gave up. "See you in the morning dude. Sleep tight." And that was the beginning of the end.

After breakfast in the morning, they put us in a car and took us for a Sunday drive around the valley.

The Client (practice short story 4300wds)

I peered across the hotel foyer past the uppity reservation staff, through the eager busboys and over the attendant flopping a discombobulated mop to find my man, the client. "Hello there!" I greeted him.

"Who the fuck are you?"

I cringed. Then stammered, “But, I, I… I’m so sorry, I, I…”

Mornings were never my best time. I should have stood up to the hard bastard. Instead, I just took it as he looked down his nose at me from within a grey pinstripe suit and cufflinks. In these places the clothes make or break the man. My haberdashery: an open collar piece, frayed chinos and cozy slippers. I was paying the price for vanity: I refused to dress for success and, sure enough, success was being refused.

He was tall, distinguished and middle-aged. I, short, loafing and young. His nostrils flared and his eyes were gleeful and greedy as he appraised my caste. His wealth was on parade and in this moneyed milieu he was the crowd favorite and knew it. Out went the level playing field. In came the golden boy. He finished me off with, "Piss off!"

Delighted with these two syllables, he'd been waiting. Stalking, biding his time in the lobby. If it hadn’t been me, then a staff member.

I wanted to say something to impress all and sundry, the staring guests and gaping staff. Something smart, powerful, and brutal. But all I could work up was the desire to call him a lunatic. And the word stuck in my throat. Something told me it was too dangerous. Maybe he really was nuts?

I turned and marched myself mechanically in the direction of the car park doors, trying to be casual, holding it together. Forty steps later, I began to breathe again as I passed the registration counter, hanging my head and dodging eyes like a pooch run out of a neighborhood by ferals.

Distracted, I bumped into a fiftiesh businessman in a suit, my left foot scuffing his. "Sorry dude." I mumbled not wanting to meet his eyes.

"Hey fella. Watch where you're going," was what I heard, but in an almost whispery voice.

Curious, I turned to look at him but he was already looking away. Another nervous stranger in a nerve-wracking strange land.

As I padded across the hotel carpet in my slippers, my mind’s eye returned to the dressed-for-success shouter and his deliberate laying into someone inferior. He’d had a real pick-me-up, better than an Australian breakfast. A real power breakfast.

Now that he was at a safe distance, my mood began to turn. Anger. An invigorating empowering emotion. I stopped, shook my head, stretched my neck.

I realized I was ready for the world now. Fuck ‘em all. I began to walk back towards the atrium breakfast restaurant.

I went to light up a smoke and caught myself. The good people of the world were eating. I looked at my watch and waited. The client was late.

To kill time I sucked on a pen, stared into space and reflected: There was something reptilian about me. Like a lizard that can't see prey unless it moves, I was often incapable of action without reacting to some other action. To function, I had to be jumped out of my foggy funk and kick-started into a can-do state of mind. Otherwise, serenity only inspired sloth, detachment was inseparable from complacency. Indifference was the closest I could get to objectivity.

I revisited former days with clients nagging about the local schedule, bitching about the island weather, and whining about the 24/7 Sunday traffic. In each case, I’d started the day off by dithering. The God-implanted drive to assault the weak trumps all national cultures. Either the claws come out and they indulge in abuse or they pass themselves off as a pal and work your over with a smile and guilt-trip.

I felt a tug on my shoulder, "Excuse me sir.” He put his entire hand on me like a bouncer. And with a bland smile, “What exactly is the nature of your business in our hotel?"

It was a medium-height member of the staff. But he was really just a jumped-up blue-collar flunky out of his element in this hotel. Faking authority, rather like me. But prepared for troubled waters with his sailor suit: anonymous black slacks and grey blazer and a bobbing black badge with Staff Support in white sans serif.

I was ready to throw a hissy fit. My rights infracted. Who the hell do you think you are touching me, my lad! I'm well connected I'll have you know. Etc., etc., yadda-yadda, yackety-yack-yack.

But he was Chinese. So it didn't happen. Never does. The fantasy got no farther than that brain fart. “Uh. Nothing. Just, uh, on my way out the door. Looking for someone I guess. Um. Have you seen…”

But his velvety face was blank, determined or incapable of help. I had a sudden urge to push him, to see if he’d react. But instead I said, “Thanks. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”

He watched as I shuffled on, past the traditional ink mountain paintings, the slab granite au natural landscapes, the deep green bonsai trees, the clinking restaurant and its feeding herds. I knew my place and it wasn’t here. And I could not rebel. For I’d been tamed. Good foreigner gets pat on the head and big face. Bad foreigner gets ignored and never learns to speak distinguished language. Islam ain’t the only culture of submission.

The country functions like a sort of sprawling clockwork with seldom a raised voice in Mandarin. The Chinese are always getting angry in inconvenient tongues, mucking it up and screeching at one another in some inscrutable dialect. If only they'd get rowdy and pull their Mexican standoffs in the national language. But no such luck. Ergo kimo sabe no can do.

I made my way out to the parking area, to scorch a cigarette and pollute some air. Another exile was outside. I asked for a light.

I inhaled and nodded my thanks. He had that rich ice-cream skin of pink blossoms and blotchy reds that comes into bloom under perennially cloudy skies. It was so unusual that I wanted to stare and as I hungrily looked I became aware of how even paler it became in the valleys framing his mouth. His eyes were blue, his eye sockets pink like an albino’s. Below the chin was turkey wattle, below the nose a feather duster of a handlebar moustache, late Freddie Mercury. And there was something doughnut powdery about him that reminded me of Japanese grandmothers, delicate and cultivated. I placed him around sixty, the hair thinning but with color mingled with gray. He was slouching slightly, leaning on one leg, and dressed quite casually in a corduroy jacket, blue jeans, sensible loafers.

"Nice day for a smoke isn't it?" was my reward for his light.

He smiled, "Every day’s a nice day for a smoke, wouldn't you say?"

I beamed agreement as he continued, "It's damnably uncivilized to force men to enjoy a simple pleasure like tobacco outside the building, like we were coolies. It's the new segregation, don't you know."

"The approved apartheid," I said.

I see where you’re going with that son, he mused, “We’re the new negroes. Yes, indeedy.” And he wagged his smoke at me like a birchman’s switch while he considered his words. He sucked his smokers teeth and pronounced, “It’s just like these busybody do-gooders to do something all-fangled wrong. America used to stand for freedom. What does it stand for now?”

I wanted to remind him that we were in China but I just shrugged and said, “Freedom Fries?”

“Do I detect sarcasm son?” he demanded.

I started to snigger and he burst out laughing.

I felt chemistry between us so I took the plunge. "So what're you doing here? Do you live here in China?"

"Just flew in for business. Like everyone else, I should say. Hopefully there will be some R&R along the way. A depressing game, this rat race. Turns us all into vermin, but it has to be done. Well entertainment has its business side. Of course it does.” He paused to inhale. “So how about yourself. What’s a young buck like you doing out in these parts?"

"Waiting for a client. I'm an interpreter." I shrugged my shoulders. "Been in this country for more than ten years now. If I was smart I’d probably go into business too."

"Ten years? You got here when you were just a lad?”

“Nah, I’m just well-preserved. Time for me to move on professionally though, that’s fer sure.” He looked me over but said nothing. He took another haul on his cigarette, then held and stared at it philosophically between thumb and forefinger.

I continued, "Translation sucks. Sucks the big one. A constant wrestling match with some of the dimmest bulbs in the local chandelier. They hand you documents under the guise of translation, but what they really want is ghost writers. Interpreting's better, but still too mechanical. The money's good but the clients are often knuckle-walkers. Half my time is spent working their verbal fumbling into something intelligible or clever. Still, I try to be amusing in the second language to make it bearable. Maybe if I wasn't so quick on my feet rationalizing the downside to this job I wouldn't have lasted this long. There’s something good to be said sometimes for being inarticulate."

"If you're articulate or creative, son, why be a translator?” He began gesturing, “I don’t know, but it sounds too mechanical. Not a creative kind of thing."

"Precisely," I shrugged sheepishly, happy to be confirmed while embarrassed to reveal that while I was complaining I was sitting on my own hands. But I also felt he was also egging me on. "I’ve interpreted for so many dumbasses, closet racists, and out-of-the-closet sex maniacs, I don’t want to know.” I reached for a phrase from my childhood that he might relate to, “A real barrel of monkeys." He smiled in recognition while I inhaled. I prodded him for a reaction. "Understand what I'm getting on about?"

"Maybe," he said. He cocked his head suddenly, frowning as if looking over a dubious product, afraid the vendor might be a shyster. After my several years of immersion in conservative Chinese facial expressions, in the land where Big Brother has been operating for five millennia, the expressions of westerners can be operatic performances; they’re so much larger than life, so extravagant.

Suddenly he asked, "You're an interpreter, you say?" He asked, hesitated while the gears turned and he made up his mind. "By Jove, are you the interpreter, by any chance? I'm supposed to meet with an interpreter fellow just this very morning. Some gringo by the name of Benjamin… Benny Bratwurst."

I shook my head, took a last puff, and said, "For God sake, that's me!" and extended my hand.

"I like you, Benny,” he charged, belching smoke in my face and not noticing that I cringed at his contraction of my Christian name. “But I’ve got to say, you're taking awful risks talking about customers like that to strangers. You’ll have to check your tongue at the office door if you’re going to go into business." But he was smiling, being generous.

"Getting fired from this business would be the best thing that happened to me in many moons," I fibbed. I crushed my cigarette with my shoe and sidled over to him, “Okay, well let’s check the itinerary then,” and I pulled my schedule out of my shoulder bag.

A few minutes later I had the concierge get us a taxi. He got in delicately, checking the seat for debris and sweeping it with his hand. I went to get in the front, my usual safe harbor from clients, then changed my mind and got in the backseat with him. He made room for me and extended his arm along the top of the seat. I started pointing out the sights.

We were soon at our appointed destination, a local performance company, Modern Myth Theater. Their office was located on the first floor of a set of residential towers, next to the atrium, with plenty of light. We rapped on the door and were met by their PR flack, a matronly young woman who was nervous and inadvertently attacked us with, “Hello, hello! Please to come in! Please take off your shoes!”

I spoke to her in Chinese, introduced myself and reached for my wallet. The client said, “This is what I call: Changing of the Card,” and smirked. I went to introduce him and said, “Sorry I don’t recall asking your name.”

“Bill Boeing.” And he gave his card to the PR flack who introduced herself as Jenny. She brought us inside where we found five other people. Two tall men, both handsome and in their forties and two attractive women in their twenties. Jenny was the most hyper, after all she was on stage right now.

She said, “This is actor, Mr. Zhou Mian-Zang. Very famous. And he has put on many production. He is the most famous in our country.” She stopped here and her pause indicated we could ask questions, though it seemed to me this was also her chance to regain her breath.

On behalf of Bill, I gave my typical performance, launching into the requisite sweet nothings and other anonymous pleasantries. I looked at them sweetly with the dead eyes of sincerity.

Jenny said to Bill, “Is this your first time in China?”

“Yes. I never thought I had a Chinaman’s chance of ever coming over, but here I am after all.”

Jenny was confused, breaking into an odd bodily throbbing, the unrestricted movement of blind celebrities. I translated for her, “Bill is delighted to be here. He never imagined he would have a chance to visit the sacred land of culture.” I threw them a curve ball. “He wishes to express his appreciation for the air of Guangzhou City.” But they just stared.

I understood why when Jenny translated what I had said in Mandarin into Cantonese, aggressively barking of the tongue of the Southern munchers of monkey-brains.

I nodded to Bill, “They’re speaking Cantonese right now.”

“Is that right, eh? It all sounds like bloody Chinese to me. Cantonese? As in Cantonese food, you mean?”

I nodded.

He savored the concept, rubbing the wattle beneath his chin. “Interesting people, the Cantonese. They built our railways, washed our laundry and in return we cut their pony tails, strung them up and ran the rest out of the country. A remarkable blight on our past!” he said with satisfaction. Continuing, “But lovely food I must say. Seshwan Chicken. And darling dumplings. Damnably good stuff.” A happy glow emerged through his powdery cheeks.

I heard a snuffling noise and suddenly Jenny barked into my ear as if it was a Victorian-era trumpet for the deaf, “Please for what Mr. Bill is saying!?!”

“Jesus!” I blurted with annoyance and lurched back to a safe distance. Trying to preserve my professional demeanor I crushed my anger into a squint and said, “Bill loves Cantonese food. Especially Cantonese food from Szechuan province.”

She stared at me, squinting, soggy lips parting only to suck gusts of air into her lungs. It was as if I had praised Italian cuisine and reserved special praise for ‘Italian cuisine from Sweden.’

Beads of sweat began to streak through her makeup. I didn’t have the heart to mess with her anymore and stuttered, “Ignore me… Just tell them he loves Cantonese food and appreciates the contribution of Cantonese cuisine to rejuvenating American culture.”

While she was explaining to the actors, I said to Bill. “For someone not out of her twenties, she’s pretty chunky. Hard-core thunder-thighs.”

He nodded philosophically.
She was outfitted in a black man-made fiber dress that fit loosely to hide extravagant curves and tumescence. She didn’t seem the artistic type. Not with buck teeth and that lisp whistling its way through each blast of roaring speech. I whispered to Bill, forgetting that no one would understand us, “Did you notice how she blinks with each syllable of English, her eyes rolling like a votary for Voodoo. Her whole upper body shakes with each word too.”

He raised his eyebrows.

I was wondering if she might hyperventilate when Bill reminded me why I was here. “Could you ask them if they’re going to put on a performance or a rehearsal that we can watch? Foreign performance companies put out too far many brochures and DVD’s.” He rubbed his chin, yawning, parsing his words deliberately. We both had a weakness for taking naughty pleasures discretely, right under everyone’s noses, “Very nice stuff don’t you know but completely unreliable. There’s nothing like being in the firing line of the spittle to gain a proper appreciation of the performance.” He cleared his smokers’ throat, “They’re immensely famous you know. They’ve toured abroad extensively. Strictly first class. The Met. The Royal Opera.” Envisioning the show already, he prompted, “It would be marvelous if you could inquire whether they could put a little something on for us.”

I interrupted Jenny to make Bill’s request and she scuttled off to take care of things.

We started talking to kill the time. Bill was an excellent conversationalist with a head full of memories and captivating trivia. By way of tastes, he announced enthusiastically that he preferred Gilbert & Sullivan to my taste for Oscar Wilde. He looked me in the eye, “Son, you don’t go to the theater so you’re judging these plays having only dry-humped the dialogue. Proper appreciation of a plays requires the baptism of performance.” He was happy with his words, now frowning at me gently, admonishing me to believe, uncle to sonny-boy. He licked powdery lips and surprised me by reaching out and gripping my forearm solidly. “All drama benefits from eye-catching choreography, you know. Those two Victorian queers, G&O made good application of that fact. And singing accompanies comedy very well on the live stage. Remember the old-day variety show. Milton Berle, Donny and Marie Osmond, and the Captain & Tennille are before your time. But you’ve surely seen Benny Hill, yes? The Simpsons today continues this fine tradition.” I wanted to counter that when the music started, my generation took it as a sign that it was safe to make a run for the fridge or the commode.

He still had his hand on my arm. I’m not squeamish and besides it seemed somehow natural for passion of a kind to enter the equation. But what his grip really reminded me of was a sturdy country gal I’d introduced to the throes of a passion. Her chicken-snatching weed-plucking strength soon frightened me and had me running for the door.

“How about fiction? What do you read?” I queried.

He wanted to talk about Becket, but I’d never read him. Nevertheless, I was delighted. It’s not every day you run into someone overseas who has literary interests. A far more common fauna was the snorting big-bellied captain of industry in a starched collar and bulging pants, flushed and looking for pointers to the nearest whore-house. “I’m quite partial to world-traveling authors,” was music to my ears and I forgot his hand. “Graham Greene’s a favorite of my generation,” he said. “Disaffected spies, disabused idealists. That sort of thing. A cleverish sort of world-weariness that comes naturally to sophisticated globe-trotters.”

But I’d found Greene’s works thin and flippant. Greene didn’t care to soil his feet by planting them on the ground. In lieu of hands-on-knowledge, he succumbed to cleverness. The economy airfare had exposed him. But I held my tongue and sucked up to Bill, to get into and savor the moment, “Yeah, I guess you could say he visited some fascinating places with some very interesting events taking place.” But the truth must out. “Yeah… But I guess I prefer Theroux and Naipaul.”

“Can’t say as I know them,” he said slowly, pursing his lips and frowning, cocking his head at the floor like a bird peering into a wormhole.

“Pardon?” I asked incredulously.

We were interrupted by Jenny panting, “The performers are coming out the makeup room.” She smiled awkwardly, doing her best to express joy and looking like a horse whinnying for its feedbag. “We hope you enjoy the show.”

As we gazed on their performance, I realized I’d seen this before, brilliant Chinese costume superimposed on western plays. The imaginative brain must keep busy or go mad. But given that China has no tradition of free speech, the imagination couldn’t be applied to debate and making or breaking concepts. It remained with what was left, the sensual: the sartorial, the culinary, the poetic, and the martial. Today's brilliant costumes and choreography were part of this curious tradition of lop-sided brilliance. And equally as predictable, the meat and bones of the performance, i.e. the play itself, was now no more than a subtext, an adjunct to the performance. Unsurprisingly it was imported from a more politically liberal locale: Shakespearean England. This integration of East and West was spectacular.

When it was over Bill was visibly delighted. He stood up and clapped with gusto. “Magnificent! Magnificent!” He turned to me and over the percussion said, “That was top rate. First water. First kidney. Outstanding these Chinese.” I was always pleasantly shocked by this sort of praise, expecting, like the Chinese themselves, to be flattered and condescended in public by the foreigner, libeled and condemned by him behind the door. I was moved so much that my eyes misted and the word ‘we’ crept into my throat. Fortunately I caught it and instead said, “I… I’m glad you like it. They do a great job with finery and body motion. Not quite sure about it’s origin though. But great stuff.”

He leaned over to make sure I heard, “From the Buddhists. That’s the provenance I believe. The old boys came over from India and brought some of their performing traditions with them. Taught martial arts to monks to keep them from sleeping, to keep the blood flowing when meditating.”

“Yeah?” His knowledge and attention to detail was so refreshing.

Afterwards, while poking his tongue around a cheek, like he was doodling on a scrap of paper, he said. “I’ll tell you what. What we just had the pleasure of witnessing was like… was as if Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns had been adapted by Akira Kurosawa for the Japanese screen, instead of the other way around. The improvement over the original would have been just as spellbinding, the colors, choreography and props as fetching and fabulous in this context as they were authentic and moving.”

“So you like it?” I said absentmindedly.

“Liking it is one thing. I’m the owner, the critic. But what about the audience? Text-based performance doesn’t cut across the language barrier. Chinese dialogue won’t hold the audience’s attention. Let’s see what productions other they do.” He nodded me to get more information.

When we got back to the hotel, I opened the door for him and led him through the gauntlet of staff and into the lobby. I raised my hand and we shook. “I just want to say it was a pleasure being your interpreter today.” I nodded. “Didn’t feel like a job for once.”

He looked wistful and alone at the prospect of saying our goodbyes. The color was gone from his cheeks and he was looking even more powdery. His leisure wear was looking rumpled and his five-o’clock shadow gave him a derelict look. “Yes, it was good fun. Productive too. Glad to have had you on board. Saved me much trouble and helped ensure everything went according to plan.” I knew I hadn’t done much at all. For this gig, I was really no more than an ornamental, a conversation fluffer. The PR girl was more than competent enough.

He said, “I gather you need to get back home, yes?”

It was at that point that I realized he was still holding my hand. He said, “Why don’t you come in to the hotel. I’ll buy you a drink.”

Suddenly embarrassed, I blurted, “I’m not really a social drinker… uh…”

He realized that I felt awkward. I suddenly felt a sudden tickling sensation in my hand like a beetle squirming to escape. I looked down and realized with horror that it was Bill. I heard myself shout “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

He looked at me, shocked and stammering “But, I, I…”

I made a face and shouted, “For Christ’s sake man!”

He exclaimed, “I’m so sorry. I, I…”

My face was red with shame and anger and then, before I could stop myself, I hissed, “Piss off!” turned on my heels and marched out of the hotel, leaving him standing there.

Out in the parking lot I then turned into the street and strode down the sidewalk.

After I cooled off, I realized what a ridiculous scene I’d made. How, being a nervous nelly, I’d manufactured an excuse to go off on him. What was the big deal? An old poofster had taken a liking to yours truly. So what? I should have been flattered if anything. But what really bothered me was the question of whether, the entire time he’d been chatting with me, had he been talking me up? The first time I’d had an interesting intellectually-minded client, had it just been an illusion that we’d clicked?

The Oriental Express Updated - Biff Cappuccino

It all started with my friend’s mom, stalwart protector, boon benefactor, and my patron saint in a newfound and unfamiliar country: Free China. Now this was way back, way back in the 1990’s, just after English teaching got big and martial law was declared illegal. Everyone was letting their hair down, speaking their minds, and double parking. Change was slow and subtle, but good things come to those who wait and the Chinese are nothing if not a patient people. Now that the cops had no bad guys to beat on they had nothing to do and no exercise to speak of and got fat and lost most of their professional enthusiasm to do nothing at all. The new duties of waiting around blind corners to issue speeding fines to delivery boys or navigating hot summery sidewalks to issue parking tickets got a gallant man to feeling so low that he had to get drunk to fire up the necessary enthusiasm to beat up a trouble maker and then the liquor went and squired a man’s thoughts so off-key that the drubbing would get out of hand and the tender hooligan might get used over hard and get drowned to death by the special spicy sauce they’d being poring up his nose. Now these were early days, so the debate was still raging about what was due process and even what was cruel and unusual punishment given that a quick death wasn’t so cruel, considering the many other colorful options of the day, and because an unnatural death was so far from unusual as to complete a full circle and volley right back into the realm of natural. Even so, during a slow news cycle, a distinguished death along with color glossy photos of the family on the ball with the water works could produce some startling newspaper headlines and then heads had to roll and another stout fellow was out of a job and into gambling and then out of pocket and out of a home and soon his family was on the sidewalk bawling to beat the band. Everyone was crying now, which struck most everyone else as being balanced and fair. The press would get a hold of that one too and whoop it up on the front page in Technicolor with maps and addresses and personalized names and all the other paraphernalia and impedimenta that make the surreal more real. Then the pundits and other assorted smarties would elbow their way into the campaign and reflect and blame some uppity blackleg or elitist black cause or conspiracy blacklist for having made one man kill some other man, often working up an appalling powerful sympathy for the killer as well as his victim. After all dead underdogs don’t bark and it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. And besides in China everyone loves a victim and treats them like royalty, venerating and praising them for their innocence, unimpeachable moral rectitude, and distinguished complacency in the face of evil. People will fight and squabble something fierce over the high and mighty privilege of being a victim or make sundry arrangements to become one. Victimizers victimizing victims eons ago evolved grandly into that civilized discourse called the win-win situation, which is of course only fair and equal. It could still be a bit confusing to folks new to the game though and people sometimes rallied around the police and blamed the victim; begging your pardon, I meant the victimizer. Or did I get it right the first time?

Speaking of victims, my friend’s mom was down with a nagging cold one day when I paid her business office a visit during lunch hour one day. At first I attributed it to her natural sympathy for her husband, dad, who was in a melancholy state. Feelings are severely contagious in a Chinese household, the Chinese being so powerfully sensitive as they are. Dad was wearing a long face recollecting how he’d personally come in from the cold. In from the snoops industry, a respectable sink of iniquity which the sunshine laws had promptly corroded into a rust belt. He squinted and blew his nose, croaking indignantly and railing a fist the size of a handsome child’s at the heavens above the ceiling and saying, “Everything was fine until those damn laws came on. We’d been squiring and shepherding the good people and keeping them out of trouble for four decades. All that good loving down the drain.” This was so profoundly saddening an experience to him that he blew his nose again, wiped a tear and went to the bathroom where he peed on the floor so he could hector his wife, mom, about leaving his messes unattended and could supervise her so he could make sure the job got done right and she learned something valuable from it. He emerged a better man, pulled his shirt into place, and marched toward his Big Boss teak desk and leapt into his Big Boss black ox armchair with the arm phone, pen holder, briefcase dock, portfolio manager and the electric rocking attachment for busy people with no time to do their own damn rocking thank you very much. He got the massage attachment going, leaned his back into it, and relaxed. He looked down on us with the serene compassion of a bodhisattva and we all felt powerfully encouraged by his new confidence.

But when I looked over at mom, she was still down in the dumps. She gasped, gave something approaching a hacking cough but which was so dispirited that it stopped short and was satisfied with just a muffled exhalation. She dripped some spittle into a tissue and went back to her desk. She sat in her chair, the one without the supernumerary attachments, and I asked her if she was alright. Dad said solemnly, “Don’t bother with her young foreigner. She’s down with a ghost.”

“What?” I was incredulous. Not mixing ice cubes and warm water, hot rice with cold rice, cold water with hot bodies made sense. Yin and Yang. And always drink tea. Water leaches out the body’s minerals and can even poison you in large gulps. But ghosts? In this day and age? I was incredulous.

I wanted to inquire more of dad, the head sage of the household, but he was steadfastly watching the lunch hour news and happily cursing his favorite politicians.

I turned back to mom and asked, “You really have a ghost?”

She looked at me weakly, eyes moist, wiping her nose. “Ever since I returned from Boston.”

“So you got hit with a ghost here in Taipei?”

“No in Boston.”

“From who?”

“From the hotel.”

“You got a ghost in Boston while you were in a hotel? Which hotel?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Humor me. Which one? The Marriott that you usually stay in?”

“Yes.”

I waited. And waited. The infinite patience of the Chinese could be exhausting. I asked, “So what happened?”

“The ghost jumped down my throat just when I was going to take an aspirin. I shouldn’t have taken any medicine in America. It’s all made of chemicals. I should have known better. Keeping my mouth open gave the ghost its chance to get in. It’s my fault. I deserve it.”

That’s one of the great things about China. Solving crimes is easy because guilt is easy to establish. Everyone’s guilty. Which is why all crimes end with a confession. Which is why the good cops and snoops were in such a bad way. With the sunshine laws, no more confessions could be lawfully extracted.

But I was curious about this Boston ghost. I asked, “So this ghost. Was he a foreigner or a Chinese ghost?”

“A foreign ghost, silly.” She smiled compassionately.

“A foreign ghost jumped down your throat?”

“Yes,” she replied resignedly.

“But don’t ghosts haunt places? If the ghost came with you from Boston, doesn’t that mean he can’t haunt the hotel? Surely a hotel is more fun for ghosts? More opportunities.”

“You foreigners don’t understand ghosts.”

“But it’s a foreign ghost.”

“But you’ve told me before that you’ve never seen a ghost.”

“Well…”

“And you don’t even believe in ghosts.”

“Okay. But still, there still has to be a certain logic to this right?”

“Not western logic.”

“But this is a western ghost.”

She smiled a great sympathetic gleaming grin. I looked across the office to find dad watching me with penetrating eyes. He lifted his chin, popped a sunflower seed into the air, caught it expertly between his lips, and suddenly burst out laughing through clenched teeth. He looked back at his TV and resumed cursing his beloved enemies on a talk show discussing politics. They exchanged harangues like old friends, like proud actors rehearsing favorite lines. It was reassuring to see television generate intimacy, not isolation.

I continued, “So this western ghost leaves his preferred haunt to go halfway around the world with you and come to China where he doesn’t speak the language. The only thing going for him is the great food here. But he can’t even eat it because he’s a ghost.”

“That’s not quite true. We feed ghosts. And give them ghost money for spending.”

“What on earth would a ghost buy?”

“Whatever he can afford, silly.” Her affability was implacable.

“And he’s probably racist too. A white man of his generation inhabiting a Chinese body? Oh c’mon. I don’t think so.”

She smiled blankly. Had I crossed a line I shouldn’t have?

Dad barked, “Young foreigner, you’ve been in our country for years. You’ve never even seen a ghost. Not even one. And this is country is crowded with more ghosts than living souls. Talking about ghosts with you is like talking about color with a blind man.”

“But surely it’s precisely because I haven’t seen any ghosts that…”

He waved me off, “You’re a man, eh? You must like politics then. Come over and watch this show with me. They’re talking about issuing police with stun guns.” He was smiling, aglow with the cherished thought of issuing some personal compassion in the flesh to whoever, whomever, or whatever was guilty.

And that was as close as I ever got to persuading anyone of anything about ghosts.

Biff Cappuccino

Getting right with Mao (first draft)

A shite short story by Biff Cappuccino...

Another bottle flew at him unseen, shattering on the wall beside him and he cringed at the glittering sound. Shards peeled through his hair pell-mell like a rush of mad insects, glass filaments like fine sand brushed over a cheek. A dank pea-green smell in his nostrils accompanied a wave of panic, too late to do any good in any case, which rushed through and spent itself in seconds. He clutched his chest, felt his heart. Still here, still in one piece, still solid. He was old, shaky, but clear. And too important to be shoved off the human stage as collateral damage, to become a newspaper statistic, a number sliding into oblivion in a reeducation camp. At his age and in his wobbly, leathery, varicose veiny condition, he’d go in to the camp but not come out. He breathed deeply. He was okay. Just out of practice. Shy like a virgin all over again. He pulled himself together as he trudged away.

A dozen yards off and he looked away from the mass fighting going on in the street. He’d seen it all before. He looked back at the wall again. The Job Wall. Between the struggling men and cops, above the arcs of rocks and bottles, the trajectories of staves and billy-sticks, he could still make out posters and graffiti offering opportunities in Chinese characters for the literate and in the Roman alphabet for lip readers. Work offered, men wanted. Lost and found ads, not for missing pets, but for missing children and addled elderly. (“Have you seen our child/father. He answers to the name of…”

Today, however, by popular demand, it was the Protest Wall.

Usually, a herd of unemployed men squatted and shared cigarettes in front of it, day in and day out. Some even slept out under the stars, early birds chasing worms. Worms! That was about right. It was the 1930’s Great Oppression all over again.

Glancing to his left, he saw his son doing his part, learning on the job, earning his digs, acquiring a reputation. Exhorting, managing, executing, fighting, bloodying, destroying. As a father, he was ineffably proud to pass down the revolutionary tradition. Jesus, Jefferson, Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Mao. Throwing the money lenders out of the temple! Off with their heads! Magnificence incarnate!

Today was the first anniversary of the county’s introduction to the novel and advanced concept of eminent domain. Banditry was the word on the street for this meat-eating flower of urban planning. No jobs but plenty of pollution, stolen pay, illegal levied taxes, back taxes, interest on taxes, new excuses for raising taxes. Special interests, special dispensations, judicial privileges, oligarchy, elitism, nepotism, cronyism. The solution? Activism. They were fighting back, enacting a citizen action, celebrating the anniversary with a DIY riot. The old man saw himself as a lotus sprouting in pure blossom from decrepit mud. The government vermin privately called such folks opportunists: strippers bursting out of rotten birthday cakes.

Times were tough, and the tough got going. Different men with different skills sought different opportunities, making the most of the mostest: Some came for jobs, others for rubes to rook, pockets to pick, tourists to shake down. Public morals were in the toilet, treading water with floaters.

Toilets reminded him of night soil which reminded him of food which reminded him of digestion. He belched, cocking his head forward to release a pungent gust of garlic and beer. He passed a sheet of wind to lighten his load, the reassuring collegial phweep! lost admist the howling of the crowd. He blinked again to soak up the wet from the eternally wet eyes of his golden years. He blew out his cheeks and reflected with frustration, not for the first time. How had it come to this? He knew who would have had the answer had he still been with the living. The Great Helmsman. He who had always set the example of purest rectitude, of self-sacrifice, of courage, of undying love for the People.

After 1949, during the torrid palmy days of liberation they’d chased the running dogs out of the garden and into the weeds and smashed them to death with shovels, picks, and hoes. They’d been in great humor then. Laughter and gaiety and pride and honor and camaraderie and unity ruled the zeitgeist, filled the newspapers, preoccupied their hearts. Pride and patriotism fueled them all to achieve prodigies of optimism. Now, after decades of exhaustive communal pruning of their dreams, the diligent cultivation of the national flower of human civilization, and the fruit of their efforts was now rotting on the vine. A lifetime of work come full circle to naught, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!

The golden mean of the Communist Manifesto dashed to nothing, he sighed. He reviewed his favorite lines of Marx. Like all poetry of the first water, it was heaven-kissed eye-candy, an ecstatic brain-fart that gnawed itself blissfully into the brain: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” Amen, comrades. “It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Oh my brothers! “In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” He went silent. What was there to say to this, which had been said so well?

He sighed, reflecting that these days it was everyone for themselves. Five finger discounts, smash and grabs, eat and run with the chef close behind, a cleaver to butcher you with as you skedaddled for your life. All good men, all driven to bad things.

Another bottle crashed nearby, releasing some brown filthy liquid in a spray. Judging by the aroma, probably a shit bomb. Judging by the strength of the stench, the spray had dampened his clothes. No matter.

Friendly fire. A lot of that today. Clumsy fools. They’d almost botched the main event before it happened. But he’d always found human clay a dodgy material. Still pondering the melee absentmindedly, he shook his hair out, pressed his hands over his skull like an ER doctor, trolled the back of his neck for damage. Right as rain. He straightened himself, pulled down his army surplus shirt. Dignity important as ever. He would go out like a proper PLA soldier, liberating the people.

Confident he wouldn’t be deliberately molested, he reached absentmindedly for a cigarette in his left trouser pocket but only found his lighter. He took it out, a solid man-sized fistful of shiny metal. He fingered it, grinned like a child and snapped it open, memories of decades of revolutionary activism tripped back into life by the mechanical musical tinkling of: “The Sun Sets Red over China…”

Those were the days. Now Mao’s workers paradise was defunct. The weeds were choking up the garden. The fox was in the chicken coop. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics! He snorted. The sun was setting in the East, the orb once again crooked just as it was under the reign of the Manchu emperors. The mandate of heaven was warping, like a drunken rainbow that now only glimmered in shades of grey.

He dodged a heavy stick that came whirling at the wall. It caught the cement lip, bounced up over the glass safety topping and disappeared over to the other side. He wasn’t excited by danger anymore. He was resigned to his fate. No. More like content. He knew what he had to do. He looked at his timepiece, an oversized pink-purplish Disney mood-watch that hung slackly off his wrist. Five more minutes.

All around him, men were pushing and shoving, the dull grunting, miscellaneous shouting, and unified chanting of slogans on both sides combined to make a tremendous racket. Everywhere was the smell of disturbed earth and rank sweat. And that putrid shit bomb. But his eyes glazed as he took in the melee. He had time for reverie.

He looked into the melee with a hard gaze that came naturally to him, an inner fortitude he hadn’t risked earlier for fear of attracting attention. Looking like a bent-up old man, penniless, and short a few marbles, had kept him safe up to this point. Now he could reveal the cutting virility within him, the strength of his mental discipline, his adamantine resolve. The smile left his face, replaced with a cop stare. But inwardly he was still dreaming, still the sentimental soul at heart. Reviewing a lifetime of accomplishments, contribution, giving back to society, leaving behind a better world for the next generation. For the children. And the grandchildren.

He hadn’t led a life unexamined. He’d left the beaten path. Gone for an extended walk on the wild side. He was an extraordinaire.

The nineteen-forties were another hard but productive time. He and Nienwen had headed guerillas hiding in the hills not twenty kilometers from here, planning actions by day, sleeping by night in slipshod shelters of rough-hewn wood and thatch. Fresh branches laid over to hide them every night. No Russian money, no German advisors. No aid or assistance. Just an ideology burning brightly in their breasts. Their peckers were in nobody else’s pocket but their own. Down below, ensconced in the valleys lay the landlords and their serfs, allies of Chiang Kai-shek, traders with the Japanese, leeches sucking the bloodied teats of American capitalists.

Their last guerilla unit had just wandered in, a unit of thirty men reduced to five healthy and three walking wounded. He was aghast at their losses, though he tried to hide it. This was the third unit to be decimated in the past month. They’d have to pick up and haul camp again, but fast. The third time they’d moved in the past thirty days, goddammit! He gave the order and a panicky packing up began. Morale was hitting rock bottom. They wouldn’t survive this. Fear spread through the air like pneumonic plague, the spiritual lifeblood of courage and fortitude was sapping out and draining their revolutionary guerilla commune.

What to do? He wondered.

First priority, assess the wounded for portability. One of them, a friend from his ancestral village, clearly wasn’t going to survive the bullet he’d taken in the lower back. He was too weak to stand now. He’d rolled the man over and gently inserted his finger into the wound but couldn’t reach the bullet. Others reached in and tried, but nobody could find it. All they had were plaster poultices, alcohol and acupuncture needles. Even a shaman of the savages could do better than this he thought dejectedly. And opium was banned, a party policy he’d never seen the sense of. It was traditional medicine. Even if they’d had it, none of them knew surgery. So what was the use of regretting something which was only useless to you anyway, he reprimanded himself.

Nobody wept. At least not in public. Bad for discipline. He looked away, went outside the soon-to-be dismantled thatch hut to collect his wits. He looked into the inexorable darkness, into the abyss of the valley and the abyss looked back. He nodded to himself.

Back into the hut he marched. Resolutely, he ordered Nienwen, “Assemble the commune in the green area. Immediately.”

Nienwen cringed, dropping his shoulders as if in an act of supplication, but protested, “But what about packing up? The landlords will have sent out posses to trail our comrades. They could be just minutes away. And recent intelligence suggests the KMT wants to mop up our area. Maybe they’ll put out a spy plane to locate us.”

“KMT pilots?” he winced. “Drunk or stoned at this hour. Assemble everyone now! Two minutes from now, I want everyone in the green area.”

“But even if that’s true, once the posse gets close, we’ll have to shut down all our oil lamps. We can’t dismantle the camp effectively without light.”

“Now! Do what I say! And bring the wounded out too.”

He distracted himself by running over one of the regional maps again, hand drawn and surveyed by his own people on foot. They were constantly reinventing the wheel out here, he muttered. But this was all extraneous. The contingency plan for their next move had been drawn up and agreed upon weeks ago. He would make no change of plans. He fidgeted, his hands opening and closing. He read his own palm to make sure his future hadn’t changed.

In the green everyone assembled. Only two hundred of them were left. Down from five hundred just one year ago. Times were tough, and even the tough got going. People disappeared. They picked up camp and moved on. New recruits appeared. But mostly they didn’t last. Everyone here was hardcore but morale was dangerously low. Dedicated yes. Suicidal no. He had to set an example. They couldn’t afford any more attrition.

Out on the green, everyone was lined up. The wounded were laid out in front on makeshift two-poled stretchers of branches and supporting thatch, looking like the travois the Amerindians pulled with horses. He spoke, delegating authority for their march through more Guangxi jungle and giving rough notice of where their destination lay. Nothing too specific. Everything here was on a need to know basis. Just in case of attrition.

He spoke again, “Bring Chang Wei-lei up front and center.” Two men pulled him over, roughly but not deliberately so. The wounded man was conscious but weak. He said, “Chang Wei-lei can’t make it. We shall have to leave him here.” Chang’s eyes opened wide. There were gasps of disapproval but he shut them down speaking firmly: “We need to pull together. This is a time for strength.” What more was there to say? He took out his pistol, aimed it at Chang’s heart, and let him have it. Twice to be sure.

Chang twitched slowly, like a man hung, like an insect beheaded. He distracted himself from the awful scene by reproving himself for wasting precious bullets to make a political point. But of course a knife wouldn’t do. He needed a clean kill. Something noble. Noble savagery. Which isn’t to say it was easy for him either way. But he wanted to make sure this was a group experience, a rallying point.

He recovered charge of the scene by accusing the others of weakness. By blaming them. It was their fault. “It was bourgeois sentimentality to imagine we could take him with us. Walking wounded only.” Their faces were long, a mixture of shock and despair. He tried another tack, “Don’t the Japanese shoot their own wounded? Their spirit is stronger than the putrid flesh enwrapping it. This is strength! This is the fount of their redoubtable power to overcome. Chiang Kai-shek is weak. An opulent man addicted to wine and women. Mao is strong. A spirit-warrior. We too must be strong.” He couldn’t tell if they were convinced. The hell with it! They’d learn. He’d never admit error. For there was no error to admit to. Besides, there would be no debate. No dissenting voices.

They marched for four days, one direction during the day, often double-backing during the night. They suffered no attrition this time. Murmurs of approval ran electric through the camp. Things had changed immensely for the better. Smiles abounded. His approval rating was up. Yet there was a lurking fear penetrating all comrades. The bar for the death penalty had been lowered. Plunged even. Yet he observed an excellent side benefit emerge from his mercy killing. Ironically, morale rose along with group fear and self-censorship. Now everyone trusted everyone else. Get with the program or its curtains for you buddy. Nothing succeeded like success. And so he was popular with the soldiers, admired by his officers, and an apple in the eye of the ladies again. Nothing worked better for life than death. A miraculous discovery. The importance of setting a new moral example. Of revaluing values.

Now that the cat was out of the bag, there was no more playing. They took their work more seriously. They kept new recruits now, made inroads into Nationalist territory. Captured their first village. Everyone naturally organized, party members or otherwise. Like minnows schooling, there was strength in numbers and networking. He’d set a new moral example. The People pulled together. He’d done it. The leader leading. And an only recently liberated feudal people easily played follow the leader.

He went on to a string of successes. The anti-landlord campaigns of the early 1950’s and teaching by example how to trip up landlord sophistry and beat offenders to death for their crimes and the inherited crimes of their ancestors. He helped round up useful idiots fleeing the crackdown after Mao’s crafty Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom Campaign. The Great Leap Forward was a boon in his area, opening up new farmland and improving production. The Cultural Revolution was a harder time as the national economy went tits up for a time. But it was necessary. He squired young fanatics to local temples and led local boys ferret out the last bad eggs and capitalist elements. They’d driven a couple hundred into a river, drowning the lot of them. Waste not, want not, they used their organs for traditional medicine, the local pharmacology particularly stressing the nutrition of human livers. It was a time of deprivation, not of depravity. Only the guilty were eaten. Either that or their worthless bodies pushed up daisies to be eaten by cattle to be eaten in turn by good folks. They’d just sidestepped a couple of stages in the food chain. Just being efficient. No need for bourgeois sentimentality. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

The melee continued in front of the Protest Wall, in the square overlooked by the vermin still peeping out of city hall. The fighting was mostly heat and noise now though. Hands shook weapons, but it was mostly waggling in the air. The paid dragoons were tightlipped and rubbernecking now. Their implements of destruction were held high, but the whole scene was now more like an air-riot, rapidly approaching farce. It wasn’t just the mutual fatigue and the climbing sun, but as noon approached, the protestors were clearly flagging somewhat.

Then there was a lull, an air of waiting. Trepidation spread throughout the ranks. One of the stooges recognized a cousin on the other side of the skirmish line and whispered. “Hey! A-fah! What’s going on? What are you monkeys up to?”

“Fuck your grandmother, running-dog.”

“I’ll have your sister for lunch too, okay?” He frowned. “Happy? Quit talking shit. What the fuck is this about? What are your demands?”

A-fah, looked around him, blank faces everywhere, but people he knew. All his own people. In fact, it was all his own people, on both sides of the skirmish line, “Hell if I know. It’s an anniversary or something.”

“Yeah, somebody’s celebrating their marriage. Haha.” He said sourly. “Fuck you! Tell me. I need to know.”

“What do I fucking look like? The fucking Guan Yin Goddess?” He looked away disrespectfully.

Everyone was like soldiers marching time, motion but no real movement. The protesters had their orders to stop at noon. The new equilibrium was predictable. The government stooges wanted pay, not injury. The more they worked, or appeared to work, the more poppy they could negotiate. Everyone went through the motions of motion, but instead everyone waited.

It was his turn. He hardened himself for the finale. No chicken-shit waffling. No punk out. He would go out on his knees, lotus position; not standing up, reading to bend over and take it in the ass from corporate man. A real man, a virile man, a man of action and gallantry, had to make a call. Think of posterity. The ultimate sacrifice was called for. For the people. It’s what Mao would have wanted.

He was proud to be a soldier. A people’s soldier. Not some pussy like Lei Feng waiting for sloppy seconds or thirsty thirds, content with wiping up after the main event, doing the laundry when the boys got back from the dirty work of fighting a cruel and foolish world. Han traitors and their running dogs, captains of industry, imperialists and their lackeys, bad elements. No, he was more like a general winding up the war and closing down the show. He looked out, took in the grappling, the shouting, the shoving, the cursing, the screaming, the howling. He calmly assessed the trajectories of beating sticks, the Mandelbrot patterns of blood, the body count. Like a poet-warrior, an esthete of the fighting arts, he took in the violence and nodded almost imperceptibly his approval. He was surveying his domain, this scene of tumult and turbulence, that he’d grandfathered. He prepared to issue climax to this morality play and bring the house down.

Everyone could feel the tension. The cops, the protesters, the city hall vermin peeking out of the only barred windows in town. A protest was a protest. Hiring petty gangsters and contracting gangbangers was just a cost of doing business. The mountain aborigines were happy just to have an excuse to beat up Han Chinese. They worked for peanuts. You got the feeling they’d almost do it for free. And yet something was different. Something was going to go down.

The old man pulled out the plastic bottle from his right jacket pocket. A slight quiver in his hand gently shaking the liter of liquid inside. Not trepidation. Age. Maybe Parkinson’s. He’d never know. The bottle carried the moniker of a popular provincial brand of tea. The yellow stuff sloshed about, appealing to him even now. He wanted it. But he was saving it for when he really needed it.

He’d prepared for weeks, grandfathering this campaign, organizing the smarties into ranks, writing agitprop to stir up the lower animals, working the entire underground into a lather of righteous discontent. He’d done it all before. Child’s play. But the consummation of this action was his crowning achievement, his way of going full circle, repaying Mao’s eternal gratitude, giving back to the country, which, by the by, was a stretch of land ringed by the borders of a southwest China backwater county being invaded by a metastasizing suburb.

He removed the bottle cap. He took off the clear plastic film, thin like saran wrap, cut from a plastic shopping bag. The heavy raunchiness of engine rooms and grease-monkeys wafted out. It was the earthiness of an earlier more muscular modernity. He inhaled deeply. Got a little high. Memories flooded back. He got a little slow. Wasted. He was getting right with Mao. He overdid it and was so messed up he almost took a sip. Blinking, he recovered his senses, tried to raise his head, found his neck slackened, his noggin heavy as a watermelon.

He was dawdling in the dirt square now, leaning a foot on the edge of a rut, looking at the county government seat. Two young doughnut cops lolled outside, swatting flies and shooting the shit, shifting their weight back on forth on dusty heels. They were under the veranda, dodging the sun, staying out of trouble.

His son asked, “Are you okay father?”

“Yes.” He blinked and almost fell over. His son smelt the gasoline and retched, the smell and the nature of the finale threatened to overwhelm him. His father forced out, “Everything is a go.” He couldn’t see straight. “Keep it together son. Is it time?”

“Yes father. Give me your hand.”

No longer pretending, he fell back into his role of simpleton without trying. He was stewed. But still a potent symbol. Making the ultimate sacrifice. Showing moral courage. He was feeling no pain.

As he lurched forward, like a drunk studiedly placing one foot in front of the other, the crowd gave way like a red sea. The riot police were nervous, almost paralytic, something spiritual, something inauspicious was about to take place, something decreed by heaven. Fear spread like an infection, and all motion ceased now. No one would intervene. He could set a new moral code. Death would breed life. He was leading by example again. Proud to go out like a spiritual warrior. He pulled out the lighter. The old song burst forth. He upended the liter of gasoline above himself. He extended his hand and flicked the flint. Nobody spoke. Nobody needed to. There was nothing to say. He was getting right with Mao.